The release date of Might & Magic: Heroes VI (much like Total War: Shogun 2, the publisher has decided on a titular reversal) has been confirmed as June 21st. Why be excited about Heroes VI? Good question. The answer is that the arrival of the King’s Bounty series would appear to have woken up the Heroes developers like a hot fork to the unmentionables. You can see some of this yourself in the videos below, but 50% of the game’s units will be new to the series, it’ll have a greater emphasis on RPG elements, there’ll be four unique classes for your heroes to evolve into, it’ll have bosses and unique levels (the game’s most blatant nod to King’s Bounty), the art’s looking sumptuous and more. Come have a look.
So, Stronghold’s been changed into a more tribal-looking race (seen in the screenshot above), and the Sanctuary are an all new sode based around Naga and water dragons. Take a look-

And here’s some footage of the game with a German gentleman talking all over it, which is rude of him. You can see one of the new boss battles at the very end.

Looking good, I’m glad to see the HoMM series getting some more love. Any word on the DRM? Are we looking at the “single online activation on install” thing from Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood or are Ubi going to regress into something worse again?

I’m really hoping for no stupid DRM. I’m not buying anything that requires an internet connection for anything more than the install process. My internet is unreliable and I shouldn’t have to crack a game just to play it because my internet sucks.

Heh, that actually was really funny, him talking about how he is required to talk by the publisher in order to be able to show the video. And that he would like to show off some of the new features of the game, except that he can’t because they are not in the video.

“Ubisoft gave us the video under the condition that we have someone commenting it. And I would love to comment all the new features that Ubisoft showed us, but this video naturally doesn’t contain a single one of them. Instead we follow this guy through the tutorial level and see everything that works exactly the same as in the previous isntallment.”

“The combat works the same as ever and there isn’t much to say about it. And because of that we’ll logically see a lot more fighting in the rest of the video.”

(Directly after first fight.) “Right, now it’s about time to watch a battle.”

“Back on the world map we can see one of the new outpost and this would be a good opportunity to speak about the new teritory system. But to left there are some earth elementals and hey, we could watch a fight!”

Then after the sigh he explains the teritory system anyway. The map is divided into teritories and each teritory has a city or outpost. If you capture that you automatically gain control over all the resources in the teritory. Heroes can still capture mines, but that only holds the mine in question for as long as the hero is there. As soon as he moves away control reverts back to the owner of the teritory.

“But who cares about all that, when there’s earth elementals to fight!”

I refuse to call it anything but Heroes of Might & Magic 6. Or HoMM 6. None of this rearranging the words stupidity! Very much looking forward to this, I skipped HoMM 5 as I didn’t enjoy what I played of it much, but really loved all the others. Even 4, though it was a redheaded stepchild in many ways.

I played the first 3/4 I think and really enjoyed them. But didn’t really get into the stories (if there were any, can’t remember). So might be interested in this if it’s like that.
Also, will there be shackled minions? That’d be good.

He’s not being rude! Ubisoft is being rude! (The German gentleman explained in the video that they only got acess to the video if they put a commentary on it.) Also he was kinda pissed that the only new additions we see in the video are boss fights and a glimpse at a castle which belongs to the new territory system.

Heroes VI has no mercury, I’m afraid. They’ve replaced all rare resources (gems, crystal, mercury and sulfur) with a single rare resource – I think they’re calling it Crystallized Dragon Blood or some such.

Have they gone into detail about how deep the RPG aspects will go? After King’s Bounty, I’d have a hard time going back to a game where my armies/items reset after transitioning from one level to the next.

The game has holes the size of a church, DLC will be coming bi-weekly for months. They cut the races, cut the double units from second HOMMV expansion, cut some heroes and well…more stuff. It will take a whole year to be on pair with last installment.

Also, 50€. WTF are they thinking? HOMM V was below 20€ two months in IIRC.

* Each turn is a day.
* Each day you get a limited amount of movement for your heros (and his attached armies) and you can build one new building in your city. Also your resource pool increases depending on the building you’ve conquered in the world map.
* At the end of the week you get reinforcements in your castle for each creature available. You buy them and send them “adventuring” with the hero.

* Some buildings in your city lead to new types of creatures. Some improve defenses, give spells or help the economy.
* Buildings in the world map are very different, ranging from giving one new spell, be able to recruit creatures, give a daily income of materials, be a dungeon to loot…

* Heroes level up and get items, stats, skills and spells. Even though the army is 80% of the key to victory, they’re better if leaded by a high-level hero with useful spells and fitting passive skills.

* Creatures are unique to each faction, but you can buy from others if you conquer them. That also applies to neutral creature spawns.
* Creatures come in a varied flavor, from Tier 1 to 7. Same as heroes they have a lot of stats, passive skills and some of them, active abilities. Even though the approach is “the more, the better” you have to prioritize some of them when building your city.

* Battles are held in a 10×10 grid, and depend a lot on stats, creature skills and math, so the outcome of a single clash can be calculated.

To clarify, everything pakoito just said is specifically “Heroes of Might and Magic.” There are two completely different sets of Might and Magic games, in two completely diffrent genres. There’s Heroes of Might and Magic, which are turn based strategy titles with role playing elements as just described, and then there are the “core” Might and Magic games, which are pure first person party-based role playing games. Oh, and then there’s Dark Messiah, but that’s a one-off.

And yeah, Clash of Heroes doesn’t bear much resemblence to the rest of the series outside of borrowing some elements from the setting and some of the music from HOMM V. It’s a fun little puzzle battle game in its own right, though.

Actually, there already was a Might & Magic IX. People generally didn’t like it. New broken 3D engine, change in the overall setting (again) — generally rubbish. Oh, I forgot the part where they shipped an unfinished game, with bugs that would keep you from finishing large bits of content, along with the usual crash to desktop woes.

I’ve been watching this project called Might & Magic Tribute for a few years now. Seems they’re looking to make a new game in the vein of M&M 6-8. Might be worth a look.

Titular reversal actually makes sense in this case, as the two series were always getting mixed up.

Not a dig, but i have a question on King’s Bounty: Does it ever get tactical?
I’m enjoying it (for some reason i can’t quite put my finger on) but there seems to be a lot of stuff packed in there – yet it’s so light. Run around. Fight battles. That’s all.
And there seems to be almost no tactics or strategy in the battles – same process works for every one. Kill the strongest enemy and work down while you wait for your rage to build up. Almost no positioning. No terrain. Nothing much there at all.

The game gets progressively harder (new areas are always a big spike in difficulty) and if you don’t manage things properly, you’ll run out of gold reinforcing your troops. Alternatively, since most reinforcements are limited in number, you can actually run out of certain units to hire.

The tactical aspects of the game are derived from the synergies between spells, rage powers and units. Against mundane mobs (assuming the infobox says you are evenly matched) you will be utilizing mostly boilerplate patterns, but most of the mobs i come up against are “overpowering” or above and by the time they’re not, i’m past the area. Tactics will become absolutely necessary @ higher difficulties against stronger enemies – particularly storyline bosses.

I was avoiding the overpowering mobs and taking out all the ones at reasonable levels, then clearing out the no-longer-overpowering mobs once i’d levelled up.
Other than a few obvious tactics that seem to work in all cases, i’ve found it hard to use much more advanced stuff. The fact you don’t get to select your “squad” for each battle seems to take out much of the tactics, and the fact that ranged units seem to be able to hit from almost anywhere on the map means positioning is pointless 90% of the time. And when it is useful, the small size of the maps makes it a little irrelevant.
I’m not a huge way into it, but i have far far far more gold than i know what to do with.
I also get a little frustrated by the way the damage works, as each unit takes damage cumulatively, your unit member numbers get slowly worn down over the course of battles, meaning you have to keep going back to top up their numbers.

That said, i’m enjoying it for some reason. It has a colorful charm and nothing is “bad” about it. I just feel like i’m missing something, and a few of the battles have started to feel a bit grindy. Just because even battles you know you’ll win easily can take a number of minutes to step through.

Come to think of it, the only battles i can’t win easily are the ones inside the items – those tend to slaughter me – and they’re the only ones that don’t give an indication of difficulty OR a chance to resurrect. But i have a zombie wife!

It also depends on the way you are gonna play it.
If you go all in, you’ll probably win each battle with no tactics but will also lose a significant number of troops each time in the process, even though those would mostly be cannon fodders.
Now if you play it with some thinking, you can pull up some pretty good strategies, even against bigger armies or bosses. But I admit the rage makes things a bit too easy sometimes, specially with AoE spells imo.

Haven’t really found any way to play it without losing cannon-fodder troops. (unless i happen to start the battle with enough rage to totally block the other side at the outset).
It’s the first of this type of game i’ve ever played, so i’m probably not doing it very well – or expecting it to be somthing it’s not.
But I’d say that i’m using logical tactics.

I guess i just wish that
– i had a larger hand of troops to choose from
– positioning was more important (protecting weaker units from ranged attacks, flanking, starting positions)
– the battlefields were a bit bigger so that the two sides didn’t clash in the very first turn.
– there was a way to (at least partially) restock troops while on the go.

I think I’d have to replay the first one to remember all the reasons, but I found Armored Princess way more tactical than Legend.
For one, the dragon abilities were much more useful from the beginning (something as simple as the stone wall was hugely important to slow enemies down), but I have the feeling the creatures and abilities as a whole were simply better balanced.
oh and bill:
Partial restocking is possible with the two additional slots (a skill in Legend, standard in AP).
And it’s possible to resurrect your troops in the battle via different means (spells, creature abilities) so as to not lose any troops at the end.

It’s almost cheating, but take a look at the official forums. A lot of tactical tips to be found there.

I played through as the mage (I think on normal difficulty). The game really didn’t start getting tactical until the latter part of the dwarven lands, and especially the elven lands and beyond. The mage can’t keep up with army numbers and in a lot of the later battles you have some very tough decisions about what to focus first, how to position your units, etc.

The game really starts to open up once you start to get level 3 magic abilities and some points into higher magic so you can cast more than once per turn.

I’d recommend playing as a mage, getting both reserve army slots, getting at least 1 level of tactics so you can position your army beforehand, and getting level 3 of all of the different types of abilities as well as higher magic if you want a tactical experience. It takes a bit to get to that point (level 3-5 units as part of your army and the enemy’s, and all of the points required to get all of those talents, especially the ones deep in the mage tree) but I found the game really opened up for me. At that point I actually had to position very carefully and choose spell casts carefully, as well as vary spells quite a bit based on the enemy army and which special abilities they had. (If you play mage, you’ll get to a point where almost every enemy army is stronger than you even if you do all of the side quests)

Ubi have had an unfortunately crippling approach to developing their Might and Magic games (although Clash of Heroes may have been an exception?) They put together an Ubisoft team to oversee development and do high-level design and control, and then outsourced the actual programming and stuff to two of the very best companies they could have found for each game – Nival for Heroes and Arkane for Dark Messiah.

Which sounds good? And it would be, if Nival and Arkane were allowed to develop each game in full. Instead they were more or less dictated what to develop by the Ubisoft team and given far more nannying and oversight than developers like Nival and Arkane should need.

In spite of it all, Dark Messiah still came out as a hidden gem of awesome and HoMMV straightened itself out eventually with the second expansion but the overarching vision that came down from Ubisoft is arguably the worst thing about either game.

I can only hope that Black Hole have been given more opportunity to get properly involved and invested in the creation of 6… (although I wouldn’t speak of them as highly as Nival or Arkane because of the mildly abysmal Warhammer: Mark of Chaos).

Still really looking forward to it still. Can’t keep me away from a Heroes game!

Oh, I am so hungary for this :) Just to prevent non-hungarians from telling the pun. By the way, usually noone mentions the new creators Black Hole. Though they are fellow hungarians, I am a bit wary. Both Armies of Exigo and Mark of Chaos were just too mediocre for my taste.

Yeah, never played Armies Of Exigo, but Mark Of Chaos was decidedly average. Except the art and the intro video, which was ace. Almost made me cry, such was the great disappointment of MoC. Let’s hope Black Hole have learnt from their previous games.

A huge fan of HOMM III and have been following this very closely. Love the Aztec influences on the new Orcs and some of the new units like the Spider Queen thing for the Necromancers look ace. But the new faction, Naga, looks a terrible hotchpotch of ideas that should’ve been reserved for a second expansion pack or something. I mean, they sacrificed Black Dragons and Titans (series iconic units) to make way for this?

Otherwise, I’m cautiously optimistic (even though I can’t make the minimum specs which are suspiciously high for a turn-based title).

Yeah, Black Hole have removed the Wizard and Dungeon factions, which is quite dispiriting. I admired the way HOMM V flipped the former faction on its head, changing their setting from snow to desert, that was really neat. But the Harpy Dungeon unit has now gone over to the Orcs, and admittedly, does look the coolest unit I’ve ever seen in a HOMM game. But a lot of fans are saying this Naga faction is just pandering to the Asian market and has no place in the series.